The makers of mosaiculture
The art of mosaiculture, although not exactly new, has been growing in popularity across Quebec and Canada in recent years. With the arrival of summer, the signature living sculptures have already started to turn up in different parts of the Eastern
Townships, to the delight of many still largely interested in spending their free time outdoors.
The name mosaiculture blends together the idea of mosaic, the art of creating a larger image by combining a large collection of small pieces (often glass or ceramic), and horticulture, the practice of growing plants. The
artworks described as mosaiculture, therefore, are large-scale artworks made out of a collection of smaller plants.
Within the Eastern Townships, both the City of Sherbrooke and the Parc Marie-victorin in Kingsey Falls have been developing expertise around the best practices of the art form for close to three decades.
“It is very complex,” said Joanne Patenaude, the Horticulture Director at the Parc Marie-victorin, explaining that there has been a lot of trial and error involved over the years since the botanical garden installed its first work of mosaiculture in 1996.
Both Patenaude and Valériane Noël, a landscape architect with the City of Sherbrooke who is on the team that plans and prepares that city’s Art & Mosaïques circuit each year, made it very clear that mosaiculture is not really work that one takes on alone.
“We do everything internally, from the design to the welding, and it takes a great collaboration between divisions,” Noël said, explaining that the creation of a new sculpture involves the ideas of a design team, the creativity of the welding artists who create a metal skeleton to support the work and give it shape, and the practicality and ongoing care of the horticultural team who prepare, plant, prune, and generally care for the plants as they mature. “We come with ideas, but they really bring them to life,” she said.
“To me it is always magical to see them completed,” said Patenaude, reflecting that even knowing about all the work going on behind the scenes and seeing what is being done, step by step, the end result of each sculpture still has the power to surprise and delight.
This makes sense, since surprise and delight are key aspects of the appeal of mosaiculture as an art form.
“In planning a new work, we always want to create something that is playful, but also integrated into its environment,” Noël said. “When we are planning a work, the first thing we think about is where this piece is going to be installed.”
Sherbrooke’s municipal greenhouses have engaged in some form of mosaiculture for decades, primarily in sculptures one can find within the Domaine Howard Park, but the city really stepped up its production and the playfulness of its work in 2018 with the start of the Art & Mosaïques circuit.
As a part of that “outdoor gallery” a collection of living artworks was deployed during the summer season largely around the Lac-des-nations walkway including leaping fish, a giant rubber duck, and works aimed at highlighting some of the history of the area by mixing plants and historical photos. Probably the most notorious of Sherbrooke’s mosaiculture works in the years since has been Gustave, the garden gnome, who has a tendency to move around town and visit different areas and events, often with sitespecific props in hand.
“It is fun to see peoples’ reactions” Noël said. “People often don’t realize that these are real plants.”
In Kingsey Falls, the mosaiculture works help to anchor several different sections of the themed botanical gardens, but even if they are more fixed installations than Sherbrooke’s creations, Patenaude said that the gardening team puts a lot of time and thought into how they will look each year.
“We work a lot with plants that have been developed specifically for the practice of mosaiculture, but also experiment with plants that are outside of the tradition if we want to play with a new texture or colour,” the horticulturalist said, pointing out that the plants chosen are both the colour palette and the structure of any given work. “It takes thousands and thousands of plants to cover a structure, and people do not think about that,” she added. “All that is done by hand, plant by plant, in a space of about two inches; we work with a team of people who are very passionate and very patient.”
Patenaude shared that just one of her park’s puffin sculptures features about 2,600 individual plants, while
Noël said that her team’s 2021 pride and joy, the octopus at the heart of Sherbrooke’s Wellington sur Mer space, features over 14,000.
“We are really pleased with the result,” she said.
Since the sculptures are filled with living plants, their appearance is also subject to constant maintenance and oversight. Patenaude said that many mosaiculture plants have been picked and planned specifically for their limited need for watering, but figuring out the right way to get water to each plant when it is needed can be tricky in a complex structure. On top of that, plants need to be trimmed as they grow, lest the carefully planned mosaic lose its integrity.
Of course, the team also needs to always be on the lookout for disease.
“The more plants are close together, the less air they have access to, the more chance for disease,” Patenaude said.
Over the years the team at the Parc Marie-victorin have come to understand which diseases and treatments are most common, but the horticulture director said that they also make a point of keeping extra plants on hand.
That practice, she added, also comes in handy when people decide to sit themselves or their children down on the art.
“I can understand, it looks so comfortable, but it is not good for the plants,” she said.
As work continues in Kingsey Falls to develop and improve upon the in-house mosaiculture skills, Patenaude said that she is also pleased to see the way the practice is growing in popularity in other areas.
“We were among the first in Quebec,” she pointed out, arguing that the work that has been happening in the Eastern Townships over the decades played an important role in opening the public’s eyes to this complex botanical art form.